In a great article by Evelyn over at EvelynParham.com she talks about the effects of traffic loss and how it can make a blogger feel.
I can completely relate seeing that my blog has had peaks and valleys in traffic over the years and I am not talking about going from 2200 to 2000 visits per day, but from like 3000 visits per day to 1500 per day, 50% traffic volume loss over a long term period.
Dealing with Traffic Loss
When dealing with vast traffic fluctuations, staying positive is important, remain optimistic and don’t get discouraged. Honestly, when I fell 60% for 2 months going from 1000 visits per day to 200 per day from June/Aug 2010 I almost thought about quitting. I did some research and found it was relating to testing a new SEO plugin at the time and once I put the AIO SEO Pack back all my traffic came back.
Trends and patterns also cause traffic shifts, my write wrote Pottermore articles in July/August 2011 that brought over 100,000 visits to my site in the same month, then the traffic faded as the trends became less potent and I slid back to 60k visits per month, this is a 40% drop in traffic but the traffic spikes were to specific articles.
Traffic ebbs and flows, know what patterns produce and try to keep bringing readers interest, finding new things to write about and creating posts with long term traffic building are important. Writing about recent trends that won’t have lasting information 6 months or 12 months from now are guaranteed to bring traffic loss, try to write for near permanency, write articles that solve problems or provide insights that people searching for it will find beneficial 1 year from now, not just at this very moment. I take this approach to as many posts as possible now, while still trying to capture short term trends.
Huge Traffic Spikes
Huge traffic spikes may not be as much a boon as you thought anyway, when reading about WordPress plugin Fake Traffic Blaster I learned that some competitors will spam your blog with non-browser traffic to hurt your SEO performance and your bandwidth usage. This plugin which is free and written by Hesham from FamousBloggers.net claims to help eliminate and redirect non-browser fake traffic to help keep true user traffic on your blog.
I did learn a lot from visiting this plugin page and reading more about it, I am also in the review process of testing the plugin to see if it lowers traffic showing up in analytics for my blogs and if it makes a difference in some way to performance.
Bottom line is not to let yourself get discouraged when your traffic drops, take a breather and look for what may be the source, look for drops in specific pages or posts and if you can’t find any then look to see if referral traffic from another site is the reason, often StumbleUpon will give huge traffic bursts that may vanish or an article will trend on Reddit or another network and then suddenly won’t be trending anymore.
Never stop writing and never let a thing like traffic loss make you feel like you should quit, always learn, always refine and always continue to make your mark in the blogosphere.
I encourage you also to read Evelyn’s full article here: http://evelynparham.com/2012/01/13/my-traffic-has-fallen-and-it-wont-get-up/
Tell Evelyn I sent you.
-Justin Germino
